The taming of the husky

Daria is an absolutely wonderful dog. She is dominant, but not towards me. She is very calm submissive towards me; she just shows dominance towards other dogs. She is basically an easier dog to deal with than Loki in every way.

Loki is, perhaps, the most hard headed dog I have ever dealt with, as you all know. He has tested me every day of every minute for the past year, and I really love him for that, but it has limited our progress. In the past year I have been unable to progress past very basic obedience with him. Admittedly, this is most certainly my fault for not knowing what I was doing with training dominant dogs, and I knew Shiba Inus were a nightmare to train. Don’t mistake me, he is a wonderful dog, he’s just not going to always do what you say; he has a mind of his own.

Daria, on the other hand, lives to please. She wants to do everything you want, you just have to teach her how. In the past week she has learned sit, down, sit-stay, down-stay, on-by, gee, haw, and the basics for heel. She also has a rudimentary understanding of ‘come’. In one week she has made it further in training than Loki has in a year. This is not to say she’s smarter than Loki. I think Loki is actually the smarter dog, she’s just not as hard headed as him. Its like I told my mom when she commented that Daria was more intelligent. If trainability correlated with intelligence, I would be one of the dumbest people on earth. Meeting Loki for the first time was like unstoppable force meets immovable object. Which one of us was which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Overall, I think Daria has been good for Loki. He’s more confident, in general. I think he feeds on her confidence; she shows him how to be a more stable dog. He sees her having fun, getting petted, and having her tummy rubbed, and he wants in on the action. So he starts to approach people, cautiously at first, and when he sees that they just want to pet him, he is that much more confident the next time he meets someone new. I really think Daria was the right dog for us, and I am really happy I got her.